Joshi loves his Blantyre life

Hello

Since our trip to the bush we have been staying in Blantyre getting more settled in. This week we are sadly saying goodbye to our friends Will and Meg who have been here for the last year. It is one of the hard things about living abroad – you make wonderful new friends and then say bye to them after what always seems such a short time. But Will and Meg live two streets from us in Queen’s park, so we look forward to catching up when we are back!

We are getting excited about Helena coming back after her long trip to the UK, and Roshina coming out to start a year here replacing Meg, and Joshi is especially excited about Granny Lou and Grandpa Stephen arriving on Wednesday for a 2 week trip – we will update again when we have some pictures of our travels around Malawi with them (diesel permitting). I am getting things together slowly to start my study when I go back to work from maternity leave, and Gav is working hard getting the kidney services up and running here. There were supposed to be more demonstrations here this week, but they were cancelled at the last minute, it seems due to various pressures being applied on the groups. But the causes of the unhappiness and unrest that triggered the original demonstrations on the 20^th of July remain so I don’t think it will be long before something else happens. This weekend the President Bingu dissolved his cabinet and assumed all the posts himself, so we shall see what happens next – we live in interesting times…………….

In the meantime here are a few pics of Joshi around Blantyre – he especially loves going for a walk around the neighbourhood, although we get a lot of stares as not many people here carry their baby on their tummy in a baby bjorn………….

Lots of love

Emma Gavin and Joshi J

Bush baby

Hello!

We finally managed to get out of Blantyre this weekend. To save diesel we went to a local national park Liwonde National Park, which is on the shire river as it flows out of Lake Malawi on its way to Mozambique and the coast. The entire park is based around the river and has a huge elephant, hippo and croc population plus masses of birds. We drove up on Friday afternoon and arrived at sunset at the camp site, where we stayed in a ‘luxury’ tent – double bed and ensuite hot shower is pretty luxurious in the African bush. . The camp was run by a charming Carlsberg-marinated muzei muzungu (wise white man) called Darren, who immediately supplied us with cold beer to watch the sunset over the baobab trees. We did two safari drives the next day and saw masses of beautiful birds but no large animals close up – this is typical of safari in Malawi as the big animal populations have been severely decimated through poaching in the Banda years and are now starting to be restocked. But the trees, light, river and birds were utterly stunning and we had a really relaxing weekend, and Joshi even managed to sleep in his travel safari cot and instead of sleepy music he had the sounds of the African bush including grunting hippos to lull him to sleep!

Gav has started work full time as a lecturer in the College of Medicine today and managed to get diesel today, so we are celebrating our full tank. Blantyre is very quiet when there is no diesel. Our water problems might get better if we can get a special valve fitted (on average we have hot showers currently twice a week, usually v late at night and Joshi gets washed in a bucket each night) so fingers crossed the valve will sort our problems. More demonstrations are planned for August 17^th and we are all hoping they are more peaceful this time.

That’s all the news for now – we hope you enjoy the photos of our trip

Lots of love Emma Joshi and Gav